Ethernet is a communications technology that has been used in the automotive industry to provide higher bandwidth than some other conventional in-vehicle network (IVN) technologies such as Controller Area Network (CAN) and FlexRay. Automotive Ethernet technology typically uses a twisted pair of copper wires as the transmission medium.
Automobiles can be a noisy environment with respect to in-vehicle networks. For example, Ethernet communications can be affected by, for example, external low frequency short impulse interference, narrow band radio frequency (RF) interference, and decision feedback equalizer (DFE) error propagation. Various techniques have been used at the physical layer to provide reliable point-to-point communications in an Ethernet network, including, for example, forward error correction (FEC) with Reed-Solomon encoding and FEC frame interleaving.